to spend £280 a week to feed a family of 5?

[TempleOfBlooms]

I spend about £280 a week on food. This includes my work lunches which tend to be salads from places like Leon plus coffees etc. The rest is food eaten at home.

Breakfast for all five of us tends to be things like Bircher muesli or chia based stuff with fruits and nuts. Fresh juice too.

Lunches in summer are usually a selection of dips and cheese and meats and salads.

Dinner is usually fish or chicken with a selection of salads and grilled veg.

So fresh food but not caviar or ridiculous indulgences.

It seems like everyone else on here can feed a family of four on tiny amounts. How? We certainly could eat more cheaply but that would mean fewer veg, fewer fruits, less fish etc.

Is it really so unusual to spend so much on food? I never see anyone else admit to it.

I took the dc's to the Canadian Rockies for 10 days for £6,000. Newyork for £2,500 Sicily for £1,600 ( all in the last 2 years and in school holidays) maybe not everyone's cup of tea but doable. This year we are going to get a boat to island hop in Greece- total £3,500 including flights and a couple of nights' accomadation.

Lol.

I can honestly say we eat very similar at about £60 a week. We don't eat out at all though and don't buy branded unless we prefer it.

And with all due respect, £5,200 isn’t going to get any family a fuck off amazing holiday. 2 weeks on a Greek island, maybe

Yeah that would be so shit it would hardly be worth bothering with

Oh and that includes pets food! I try and plan meals that all share similar ingredients so i'm not buying stuff that's going to go unused and be chucked away

or I do a Tesco shop online for about £35

I've never found an online shop that you can do without a minimum £40 basket. And that doesnt include the delivery or pickup costs.

We're a family of four and on average the weekly online shop is around £160, but then I'm always popping in for extras or if we see a recipe we fancy that I need ingredients for (or sudden socials/imprompu bbqs etc). So I guess around £200-£250 a week not including lunches out. That does include cleaning products and stuff though. I am really surprised when people say they can manage on £100 for a family of four!!

Wyatt98765 No but now and again most of the meals are what you call

One pot meals usually take 30 minutes about the time it takes to cook chips and I also have a slow cooker
See pic -Pama ham wrapped chicken with cheese in the middle on a bed of leeks 😋

We pay on average £40 every two weeks for DH and I and baby DD from Asda. I've just put a large order through but only as it included DD's ready made formula which costs a bomb. I wouldn't say we buy everything cheap, but i do usually buy their cheapest range. DH can't tell the difference.
I make most of DD's food instead of giving her pouches etc which helps keep costs down.

Unfortunately costs are driven up as he is a meat eater, so needs to have fish/chicken/lamb once a week, and the previously mentioned formula! (Yes, we have tried to give her powder).

You can probably make Leon style lunches at home for a lot less.

Wyatt, I cook 'faffy' meals every night, but I haven't generally been on my feet for 14 hours. There are loads of cheap, easy (and healthy) meals that can be thrown together by a tired person in half an hour though.

This is where I think cooking is a skill. The knowledge to be able to do that is invaluable.

I appreciate that not everyone is interested in food to the extent that I am, but I do think that schools should be teaching old-style home economics, as it's obviously something that doesn't necessarily come easily and the knowledge of how to feed a family cheaply, or quickly is not always taught in the home these days and is a very important life-skill (yes, SKILL).

What the fuck is Leon?

This year we are going to get a boat to island hop in Greece- total £3,500 including flights and a couple of nights' accomadation.

So slumming it this year.

Yes I thought two weeks on a Greek island sounded ok too!

While we are all winding each other up has anyone mentioned the obesity crisis?

Leon salads are rubbish. You want the fish finger wrap - lovely and very filling so you'll eat less for supper.

You could also buy your own refillable coffee cup - that would save you 10p a day.

Maybe try own brand olives?

Olivia - riding a bike is a skill. Not one that’s particularly impressive or accomplished. If you want to consider cooking a skill I’d put it in that sort of category

Don't be ridiculous. My children learnt to ride a bike in a few minutes at the age of 6ish. We are a family of cooks (my Mum taught cookery for years) and although at 8 and 10 my kids can bake cakes and make simple meals by themselves they do not have anywhere near the skillset of the adults in the family.

Skills they don't have:
They don't have the control or strength to roll out pastry well
They have no knife skills - deboning a joint or filleting a fish
They don't have the fine motor skills to do intricate icing (or any other fine manipulation of e.g. pastries or sewing up a chicken after stuffing it)
They have never plucked a chicken or prepared it for cooking (I grew up on a farm, this was a skill I learnt at a young age)

Chef train for years to cook at a high level, it may not take much skill to make a tomato sauce with pasta from scratch but there are lots of skills the majority of us never learn.

Leon's a relatively new chain of lunch/early supper restaurant/take away. Loads in London now.

I'd rather have one Leon salad a week and bring in a sarnie from home the other days than have five days of Boots Meal Del lunches

And holiday-wise, we're off to a family wedding in The Netherlands followed by a week in the Dordogne, and a week on the French Atlantic coast in the Summer holidays for less than 3k.

And off to New England at October half-term for a leaf-peeping fly-drive which has
cost just over 3k all in.

So I think 5k is plenty for a decent family holiday!

Off topic I know, but I bloody love Leon. I'm not in London any more, really miss it. I'd kill for a fish finger wrap right now.

I think Leon is an upmarket MacDoe

We are the same when you factor in snacks and top ups pretty much

And we have cut down on wine and eat meat rarely and I take packed lunch !!

Ahh, titchy, it's a load of old shite, then.

If you're happy with what you're spending and can afford it then you are not being unreasonable if that's how you choose to spend your money. Even though it might seem like a lot to those who aren't wealthy and have to budget.

If you're not happy and want to spend less then there has been lots of advice offered about how you can do that.

Sprinkles I don’t think cooking is any more or less of a skill than darning socks!

You can get instructions for darning socks in books or online. You can buy the needle and thread for darning socks in any sewing shop. And then you essentially just patch the hole with thread - pretty easy if you know how.

But the last 4 words are (to me) key. Cooking tasty food is easy for me, because I’ve grown up doing it. I know how low “low” is when making a cheese sauce. I know that I can pause stirring it for enough time to grate some cheese but not enough to chop an entire load of vegetables. I know that when the recipe says 200, that in my oven that will be 180 or even 170 depending on the dish. I know that some things in recipes can be substituted and some things you can’t - can I switch this veg for frozen, could this be tinned instead, could I use up these veg instead of those listed, can I swap this in for that because it’s on offer this week. I know which dishes will stick so I need to line my trays so I don’t spend my life scrubbing carbonated food off baking dishes. I can read a recipe through and see how to adapt it to make it suitable for the people eating. I know when I read a recipe whether it will come out well, and what I would need to do to make it come out better and whether I can make it easier (e.g oven bake instead of pan-fry), or if I can part-prepare it and freeze it or if that will ruin things.

The above aren’t necessarily Essential skills for cooking. But they make my cooking a hell of a lot more successful for the same amount of effort for me.

I have a car. I am totally capable of getting the handbook out, and the Haynes manual, having a google, running the OPD, looking up the fault codes, comparing what the three things say, checking exactly which bolts need undoing etc. But I have to keep on looking back at what I looked up, checking I’m doing the right thing, I have to concentrate really hard or I end up having to redo things because I’ve undone the wrong bolt or am looking in the wrong place. It’s stressful and unpleasant and I’m always worried I’ll get it wrong. This is because I’m not familiar with it - I remember when cooking felt like this, whereas now it’s second nature.

I'd actually say Leon is fairly unpretentious food. It's really tasty and not expensive.